This Side of the Sun
by Lassiter
Summary: All that is gold does not glitter. "So you're not cracking?" John, Rogue, and a rendezvous. Post X2. Pairings-wise, there is the ubiquitous Bobby/Rogue, but beyond that, subtext is your friend.


**Disclaimer**: Characters = not mine. Ask Marvel and Fox for details.  
**Summary**: All that is gold does not glitter. "So _you're_ not cracking?" John, Rogue, and a rendezvous.   
**Pairing**: There is the ubiquitous Bobby/Rogue, but beyond that, subtext is your friend. Winkity wink.

**This Side of the Sun**

  
Ring, goes the phone. Ring, ring.  
  
It's been ringing all afternoon. Rogue knows this because she's been in Bobby's room all afternoon, because Bobby wouldn't let her leave.  
  
"Don't pick it up," said Bobby.  
  
"Don't you find it annoying?"  
  
"No."  
  
So it rings. It rings twice more, and stops. A series of three. Four series of three so far.  
  
Sometimes they tangle together on Bobby's bed, quiet like stillborn Siamese. Sometimes he paces, picking up random artefacts around the room, turning them over in his hands and not really looking at them. Other times he's just quiet: by the window, at his desk, at the foot of an empty bed. Rogue only watches from Bobby's own bed, because the first time she tried to comfort him, Bobby interrupted and said the silence was fine.  
  
Ring, goes the phone. Ring, ring, and they ignore it every time.  
  
When Bobby finally gets up and heads for the door, Rogue asks, "Where are you going?"  
  
"I don't know," he admits. "Do you want to come?"  
  
"I don't want to bother you if you want to be alone."  
  
Bobby considers this for a few moments, and closes the door behind him as he leaves.  
  
The phone rings.  
  
"Hello?" Silence on the other line. Rogue repeats herself: "Hello?"  
  
"What are you doing in my room?"  
  
It's a voice Rogue has heard often enough, and these days she thinks she hears it too often. These are the familiar tones and inflections that snake around her brain and onto her tongue, making her say things that cause Bobby to stare. Onto her hands, making it ache with the desire to control the bright and beautiful. To hear the voice in her ear instead of her head, the most she can manage is "John?"  
  
"You're fast. What are you doing in my room? Where's Bobby?"  
  
-  
  
Bus stop, up the road and just over the hill. She's there before he is.  
  
The bus pulls up like a lumbering creature and spits John out by the side of the road. He watches the bus disappear before he even looks at her. The boy seems a bit worse for wear, despite the new clothes. Something in his face is a little too hard, almost like he's putting on a show. John scratches his ear and Rogue feels an odd sense of déjà vu, feels weirded out until she realises that that's what _she_ does when she's nervous and trying to hide it.  
  
Or…  
  
No.  
  
Wait.  
  
"So," says John. There are five plastic seats at the bus stop. She's on the second. He sits on the fourth. "How do you know this isn't a trap?"  
  
Rogue blinks. "I… what? I trust you."  
  
He wears the smirk like an old glove. "No, you don't."  
  
"This isn't a trap," she says, each word struggling through belated panic and what-ifs.  
  
John lets a dramatic pause slip through before replying, "Well, you're right."  
  
"You wouldn't set a trap this close to the mansion anyway," says Rogue quietly. Shakily and nervously. John catches her glancing around from the corners of her eyes and he chuckles.  
  
"Mystique broke in and impersonated Bobby," he says, lighting a cigarette. "You think we'd be worried about that?"  
  
The 'we' catches her by surprise, as does the cigarette. John never used to smoke. Considering his mutation, Rogue had thought it ironic and asked him about it one time. John replied that he didn't like the ashes. He didn't like the burning in his throat, because he was supposed to be the one to burn things, not the one burnt. He blows smoke into the air and looks at Rogue with lazy eyes, challenging her to say anything.  
  
"So what do you want?" she asks.  
  
"I was in the neighbourhood."  
  
"Magneto's around, too, then. He's… he's in the city."  
  
A few seconds pass before the reply. "No. He's not."  
  
_You're lying to protect him, aren't you_, is on the tip of her tongue, and Rogue decides that's as far as those words will go. The accusation would be an exercise in futility. He would protest and she would protest, and they would run indignant circles around this all night. It's not what really matters.  
  
Finally John says, "How is everyone?"  
  
"Quieter," she replies. "Doctor Grey died. Did you know that?"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"Everyone's treading so softly now. Especially the teachers. No one even sees Mister Summers outside of class anymore. And Logan's out of the mansion a lot of the time, and the teachers are treating us like we're the ones cracking and not them."  
  
John makes a sound that might be a scoff, might be a forceful exhalation of smoke. "So _you're_ not cracking?"  
  
"Maybe… I don't know. I'm a little tired, though."  
  
"That's not surprising." A pause. "How's Bobby?"  
  
"He's very quiet."  
  
Rogue can tell from the shape of his mouth that John's attempting smoke rings. All that comes out is a thin cloud that swirls and dissipates. John raises a hand and for a moment Rogue thinks he's trying to catch the smoke, manipulate the remnants of his fire, but he just waves the smoke away.  
  
"I think he misses you," says Rogue.  
  
"Yeah? Do you miss me, too?"  
  
"Sure."  
  
And that's when he laughs. It's a quiet kind of laugh, the kind indicated more by the shaking of the shoulders than of any real sound.  
  
"What, you think that's funny?"  
  
"Actually," says John, "I do."  
  
There's something of veiled condescension in John's self-deprecating mirth that makes her hesitate to smile along, and in her unresponsiveness, they slide into silence. John starts with his lighter again, and for a while there's no sound but the faint birdsong from the woods across the road and John's familiar Zippo click click clicks.  
  
She finds herself scrutinising him for signs that he changed, signs that he stayed the same. He's wearing new clothes; they're cleaner and the colours, haven't yet been subjected to multiple encounters with temperamental washing machines, are still bright. But even so, they're just variations of his old clothes. There's the smoking, of course. There's the arrogance, more gratuitous than before. But Rogue suspects that if she pulls out a particular joke or turn of phrase or the events of certain afternoons, John Allerdyce, loyal to the cause of the Brotherhood, would at least smile. The longer she looks, the easier it is to see what she wants to see. The differences are difficult to quantify.  
  
John offers Rogue his cigarettes and she, after a moment of hesitation, takes one. His eyebrows shoot up in surprise and he laughs an unpretentious laugh. Rogue let herself smile, just a little. Just a bit.  
  
"Shut up and give a girl a light, won't you?"  
  
The Zippo clicks open and the flame rises like a snake charmer's cobra. It curls and ribbons through the space between them, writing something in a language only John knows. Then, with utmost precision, it flares gently upon touching the tip of her cigarette, and dies.  
  
"Show-off," she teases.  
  
John performs a gracious bow.  
  
The afternoon bathes the world in a warm glow, etching gold in where there isn't any. Around the edges of their shadows, long against the ground. In the soft fabric of Rogue's Salvation Army jacket. In John's hair. They are the blurry-eyed figures in an Edward Hopper painting, caught in a moment of waiting and held breaths. Soon the sun will set, the day will end, and someday the entire world will change; this is a promise they've been given on two different silver platters, one of which will prove to be tin. But for now, there is only gold.  
  
The bus comes sooner than either of them expects. John turns at the familiar stutter and hum and sees the contraption appearing over the next hill.  
  
"Time to go?" she says.  
  
"Looks like it." John throws his cigarette to the ground and extinguishes it under the heel of his boot. "Rogue, can I ask you something?"  
  
"Sure."  
  
"What's it like to have me in your head?"  
  
Rogue gaze flits to him warily, but his eyes are on the approaching bus. Her voice is carefully neutral: "I have a lot of people in my head."  
  
"That wasn't my question." John looks back at her. She looks away. There will be no answers. With a sigh, John contents himself with a topic change. "Well, that wasn't exactly the best reunion in the history of the world, but it wasn't so horrible, right?"  
  
"Wasn't a reunion anyway. If it were, you'd be coming back."  
  
"Oh, you want me to come back?"  
  
"I…" Her loss of words brings the blood rushing to her face. Rogue rubs her forehead, trying to hide this. "I don't want you to get hurt. I don't want anyone to get hurt."  
  
"That's noble of you."  
  
"Thanks."  
  
"I know such wonderful people," says John, theatrically. "Can you blame me for being a little nostalgic and wanting to see them one more time?"  
  
"Someone who's only a 'little' nostalgic wouldn't be calling them the entire afternoon."  
  
To this, John offers no reply.  
  
The bus rolls to a stop in front of them and the door hisses open.  
  
"Guess I'll be seeing you," says Rogue, a question mark ghosting the end of her sentence.  
  
Rogue still refuses to meet his eyes. Her eyes are so full of not looking that John wonders if she sees anything at all. With a sigh, he says, "Come here," and pulls her into his arms.  
  
This is something new. Back at the mansion, John and Rogue never became close enough to indulge in such physicality, gloves or not. Sometimes there were the generic pats on the backs or the standard arms-over-the-shoulders, but everyone did these small things, just because. John and Rogue hug in a bus stop in the middle of nowhere for becauses neither felt like untangling.  
  
"It's going to be fine," murmurs John.  
  
"What's going to be fine?" she says. Her tone is stony. She didn't intend for it to be.  
  
"I don't know. Something. Something's always going to be fine."  
  
And the bus horn blares. "You gettin' on or what?" the driver calls out. "We got a schedule here."  
  
So Rogue let go and John slips away from her like a fish. He leaps onto the bus, turns to face her, and says, "Give Bobby my rega—"  
  
Hiss. Slide. Close.  
  
The bus pulls away.  
  
Rogue throws her cigarette to the ground and crushes it under her heel, urging the memories of the last half hour to masquerade as blankness, at least until she gets back to the mansion. There are things she doesn't want to face alone in a bus stop on a dying afternoon. Rogue wonders if John is yelling at the driver for cutting him off. She wonders if Bobby's back from wherever it was he went to, and whether it would be too much to say to him, "I saw John today. I told him you missed him."  
  
Still tasting the cigarette on her lips, she shoves her hands in her pockets and starts walking.  
  
  
[end.]


End file.
